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The Marxist dream turned to unpardonable nightmare, but the new daydreams are rabid; tribalism, regional chauvinism, nationalist loathings are blazing from Soviet Asia to Transylvania, from the skinheads of East Berlin to the mug- gers of Croatia and Kosovo. With them comes inevitably the hatred of Jews-the intuition that the Marxist program of internationalism, of the abolition of frontiers, was radically tainted by Judaic universalism. T rots- ky was, after all, a Jew. So once again the old crazy drums of irredentist terri- torial claims and ethnic autonomy are pounding in the jungle of the cities. T HERE is, of course, scarcely a sentence I have written up to this point which does not incorporate, more or less directly, a phrase, an idea, an ambiguity out of Bertolt Brecht. I just adapted the titles of two early master- pieces: "Drums in the Night" and "In the Jungle of Cities." No lyric poet, no dramatist, no pamphleteer has given sharper voice to the hymns of money, has rendered more palpable the stench of greed. Few minds have seen more unsparingly into the cant and into the fluent self-deceptions that oil the wheels of profit and make outwardly hygienic the power relations in mer- cantilism and mass-consumption capi- talism. At the same time, and often lnside the same Aesopian, oblique texts, Brecht bore witness to the cynicism, to the ruses (he was the most cunning of survivors, catlike in his sinuous maneu- vers and landings) needed if one was to endure in the homicidal labyrinth of Leninism and Stalinism. In Brecht's greatest poems (some are among the finest in our century), in his best plays, in the innumerable songs of rebellion and scarred hope which he inspired and sang, the ultimate key is minor, the beat, though sometimes imperceptibly, downward. "Man Is Man" (another famous title )-man's avarice, his cow- ardice, his frenetic selfishness will most likely prevail. Mother Courage, her children slain, the land made waste, harnesses herself to her fatal cart: ar- maments for sale. The stage turns and turns. History is a self-inflicted tread- mill. The visions of justice turn to red apocalypse. What will remain of our cities is, as a great early lyric proclaims, the black winds that have swept through them. Yet the absurd, mur- dering dreams were worth dream- SEPTEMBER. 10,1990 ing. Knowingness is not knowledge, however accurate it turns out to have been. Those who were wrong, hideous- ly wrong, like the Bolsheviks, the Communards in France in 1871, the International brigades in the Spanish Civil War, the millions who died pro- claiming their fidelity to Stalin, were, in a paradoxical, profoundly tragic way, less wrong than the clairvoyant, than the ironists and the yuppies, than the Madison Avenue hype peddlers and the jobbers "bellowing" on the floor of the bourse. (The image is from W. H. Auden, whom Brecht knew, for a time, as Comrade Auden.) It is better to have been hallucinated by justice than to have been awakened to junk food. The cruiser whose blank shot initiated the Petrograd uprising was named Aurora, or Dawn. So felt Brecht, "who came out of the Black Forest." And seems to have come almost fully formed, like some incubus ready to wreak mischief. The Brecht intona- tions, the cunning gait, the corner-of- the-mouth wit, the carapace of the tightrope walker tensed for survival are there in the earliest of the "Letters, 1913-1956," selected, edited, and an- notated by John Willett and translat- ed into straight, faithful English by Ralph Manheim (Routledge; $39.95). Bertolt Brecht is only fifteen when we pick up the trail. But the credo has been arrived at: "To combine fidelity to nature with idealism-that is art." And so is the fierce insight. Brecht has a poem in mind: "In the afternoon the enemy is defeated." (We are in No- vember, 1914.) Joy on one side, rage and despair on the other: "This is a night when mothers weep." Nothing revelatory in that, but then the Brecht stroke: "On both sides." Those impo- tent tears were to fill his works. Moth- ers-militant, blind, cynical, idealistic -recur over and over. Later, Brecht would turn Gorky's "The Mother" into a play very much his own. But B.B. himself did not weep. April, 1918, a month before his call-up: "These are heavenly days. . . . At night we sing songs by Goethe, Wedekind and Brecht. Everybody loves us. . . . And I love everybody.... I'd sooner have victors than victory. . . . Y ou will con- quer the world and listen to my teach- ing, and you will die old and surfeited with life like Job who was admired by 100 camels. And then, together, we shall reform hell and make something of it." This to Caspar Neher, Brecht's